A second Gaza war around the corner?

Before asking who should stop first, one should recall who started the latest ugly round of violence.

On 26 December, Israel carried out double attacks in the West Bank city of Nablus and in Gaza, murdering three people in each place. In Nablus, Israeli death squads carried out cold-blooded extrajudicial executions in revenge for the killing of a West Bank settler several days before. According to the wife of one of the Nablus victims, her husband was at home in his living room, completely unarmed when the death squad burst in and shot him in the face. Neither he nor the other victims of these state-sponsored terrorists had been accused, tried or convicted of any crime in a court of law.

In Gaza, the three victims were reportedly workers scavenging near the border fence to salvage building supplies from the rubble of previous destruction.
Since late December, Israeli attacks have killed more than a dozen Palestinians, routine violence which is ignored by the "international community" and for which Israel is never held accountable. On the contrary, Israel's Western friends continue to justify this terrorism as "self-defense."

Israel's recent aggressions look ominously like the 4 November 2008 attack on Gaza, which killed six persons and shattered the four-month-long truce meticulously respected by Hamas. Predictably, Hamas and other factions retaliated for that Israeli provocation and then Israel used their response to justify its massacre of 1,400 people in Gaza this time last year.

It seems that whenever there is relative calm on the Gaza front, Israel is keen to destroy it. Prior to the November 2008 attack, the Gaza situation, despite the siege and the intense international pressure on Hamas, was stable -- that was the last thing Israel wanted. And despite the truth that Israel sabotaged the truce and then refused to renew it even though Hamas wanted to, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority, some Arab states and the so-called international community led by the United States blamed Israel's attack on Gaza on Hamas rockets, and claimed that Hamas -- not Israel -- had rejected renewing the truce.